Video on demand (VOD) continues to proliferate. Consumers are adjusting to the capability of receiving content on demand without specifically acquiring a physical product from a store or from a mail-order service. Typically, the acquired physical media is then played on a device at the leisure of the consumers. But, consumers are rapidly learning that videos of movies can be dynamically delivered to their viewing environments without the need to acquire a recording medium (e.g., Digital Versatile Disk (DVD), etc.) and subsequently manually interfacing the recording medium to a media player (e.g., DVD player, etc.). Thus, when a consumer desires to view a movie or video the consumer can interface with services within their own viewing environments using remote control devices and dynamically acquire and play the desired media over a network. This technology poses significantly challenges to the video rental markets and their existing business models.
One challenge for VOD technology is that a particular piece of content may be overwhelmingly popular or may be desired at roughly the same time and same day by a variety of concurrently requesting viewers. When this occurs, the distributor of the content is likely to experience significant bandwidth challenges and the viewers are likely to experience unacceptable or undesirable delays in acquiring their desired content. This is a frequent challenge with VOD delivery services because a centralized distribution point can quickly become overloaded with requests for popular or newly released content.